Fred Thompson is dropping out. Marc Ambinder offers a Thompson campaign retrospective. He says "in many ways, he tried to occupy a space that John McCain more credibly occupied; national security strength, straight talk on the economic challenges facing the country and resiliency." Maybe. Certainly I'd assume that Thompson, who's pals with McCain, hopes that's right and his pool of supporters drifts that way. But in most regards I'd say Thompson tried to occupy a space that Mitt Romney less credibly but more effectively occupied -- plain-vanilla conservative.
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Thompson Out
22 Jan 2008 03:16 pm
Comments (14)
"plain-vanilla conservative"
With daddy issues.
Bye Bye Fred, we hardly knew ya.
I wonder how much more effective his campaign would have been if he gave a shit.
But in most regards I'd say Thompson tried to occupy a space that Mitt Romney less credibly but more effectively occupied -- plain-vanilla conservative.
see: Freepers and RedState. I'd like to know whether the 28%ers in national polling are actually the same people who accuse Bush of betraying the conservative cause.
The Freeper writeup: "Oh well, we're doomed. Let's hope it'll be minimal damage until 2012." And they're apparently settling on the Mitten as the lesser evil. That makes Florida very interesting: feel the Mittmentum! (Though early voting in Florida may mean a number of dead votes for Undead Fred.)
I think Thompson was the secret hope of the zombie-Reaganites. He's an actor, he's lazy, he's conservative. Reagan redux, obviously.
In California, most of Thomspson's support was coming from evangelicals. Romney is not rumored to be their second choice, as he was the reason they ran towards Thompson in the first place.
Thompson tried to occupy the Southern-drawl good ol' boy space - Huckabee without the religious craziness - but instead, all the Southerners who need to have one of their own to vote for went for the Huck.
I just want to see a video retrospective of the media fawning over Thomspon for months on end. Might as well follow that up with a Giuliani retrospective along the same theme.
Hopefully, the best thing to come out of this will be a large decrease in his radio audience.
I saw Thompson as the replacement for a George Allen or Rick Santorum after they blew their chances by loosing Senate seats.
If you want to place Thompson, I think he goes somewhere between Romney and Huckabee. Like Romney, he was trying to be the conservative's conservative except Thompson was actually southern, which always helps. So Thompson was getting a lot of southern christian votes, which means he was drawing from Huckabee. I expect Huckabee to be helped the most by thompson's withdrawal.
"The Evangelicals will not go to McCain or Romney."
They will not elect the next president, either.
I liked the "he's not lazy" comment. The one characteristic of all conservatives is an adolescent crush on 'leaders', be they the he men of industry, the military, or our great warrior presidents - like President Backbone, as Larry Kudlow named the current resident of the White House. That crush simply abolishes any metric in its way. Obviously, if Bush wasn't a great leader, he wouldn't be in the white house - just as he must have been a great soldier in the National Guard of his time, because he said so, and he joined a Guard unit flying those complicated planes. Fred Thompson was, outside of the blinders, funny, and he will be missed. Who can forget the concession speech in South Carolina when he compared Americans who had given their blood - he seemed to be referring to people who'd been shot, or lost a leg to a landmine or IED, or pulverized by a shell or bomb - to people who bravely drove a car all the way, all the way without stopping once or maybe stopping to get gas or something but still going to the very end of their destination, to a polling booth to vote for him. In bad weather, too! Conservatives are, generally, a heroic lot, but who knew they were brave enough to drive through a rainstorm? We owe so much to those brave men and women!
Otherwise, Thompson's main accomplishment was to form the center of a schtick on the Red State Update. That is about it.
Am I the only one that thought Thompson may have been a McCain stalking horse the whole time? Thompson never seemed to really care, and he ate away at the groups that hated McCain. It is not that far fetched, Humphrey ran in '60 to split liberals with Kennedy and help LBJ. Thompson was a big McCain booster, and with SC done, it seems he did the spoiler job fairly well.
Comments closed February 05, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Actually I think Huckabee is the biggest winner. The Evangelicals will not go to McCain or Romney.
Posted by MS | January 22, 2008 3:26 PM